January 29, 2025

By Father William Muench
NCC columnist

One of my tasks this week is preparing a presentation for this year’s RCIA group on “prayer.” So, today, I thought I would share with you some of my ideas that I hope to share with them. This is the group that is spending this year preparing to enter the Catholic Church.

I have decided as an opening for this presentation to have a few minutes of silence. I want this to be a time of calm quiet as preparation for this class. I also want to demonstrate that silence can be a prayer, a time to open our hearts to recognize the presence of God. I believe and hope that the Lord’s love and peace will touch their hearts.

I then plan to begin the presentation just as Jesus did. The Gospels tell us that on one occasion the apostles asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. Jesus then taught them the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer is now a part of the spirituality of all Christians.

The Lord’s Prayer is a profound prayer, and these are the words of Jesus. This prayer keeps our attention on God. The prayer opens our hearts to the very presence of the Lord. Jesus teaches us that when we pray to God we should begin “Our Father.” We are called by the Lord to establish a relationship with our God. He tells us that God wants to be our Father.

Then we begin to praise our God “who art in Heaven.” We remember “Hallow be his name.” We pray “Thy Kingdom come, and Thy will be done.” We ask God to “give us our daily bread” – remembering the gift of the Sacred Eucharist. Then we bargain with God: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Prayer is about placing ourselves in the Lord’s Presence. We do know how active our minds are; we are so easily distracted. So, words can help to draw us closer to the Lord. The words of Sacred Scripture can help to focus our attention on the Lord. The Scriptures can be our prayers. They can keep us close to the Lord. There are also many books of prayers that keep our attention on our Lord and Savior.

The official prayer of our Catholic Church is called the Divine Office. There are the prayers of the monks in their monasteries. They pray this Office every day, every hour. The Divine Office is also the daily prayer of the deacons and priests of the Church. The interesting thing is that nowadays everyone can find and pray these prayers of the Divine Office using an app on our cell phone.

We begin to pray with the Sign of the Cross. This Is a prayer. This gesture is a beautiful moment of prayer. A prayer to seek God’s support and help. I also want them to understand that our best prayer is our participation in the celebration of the Holy Mass. This is also a sacrament, a time to find the presence of God as we remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and a time to receive the body and blood of Our Lord in Holy Communion.

Our Church has many more prayer opportunities, like spending time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament in Church, the recitation of the rosary, the Stations of the Cross – these are again times to place ourselves in the presence of our God, a time for God to find us, a time to realize that God has always loved us first.

Each time we turn to the Lord In prayer is a time to dedicate our prayers for someone – family or friend, someone we have promised to remember in prayer, someone in need. In fact, we can pray for our whole world or country, for peace and hope for all.